On a Windows Vista or Vindows 7 disk, all versions of the operating system are present, from Starter to Ultimate, and everything in between. So, if you want too upgrade to a more capable version of Windows down the road, all you need to do is pop the Windows disk in, let Windows Anytime Upgrade do its thing, and you're done. It seems like Intel is experimenting with a similar technology... For its processors.

Its a good deal for us technies if this gets cracked. Typical folks will still fall for the extra $$$ for more speed while those of us who are savvy will get better performance for much less.

To me this really indicates that the desktop is in severe stagnation. The old school cpu manufacturers can't figure out how to innovate anymore so its come to this.

Another aside...this tells how poorly amd is doing. Last week I got ahold of a dual socket 24 core amd system. Running against a dual quad i7 the amd was clearly half the speed per core on heavy cpu load. Mixed loads the amd seemed to do not quite as badly. The good for AMD was that the system itself was overall faster than the intel on the multithreaded load. With intel 6 cores coming out that spells more trouble for AMD.